Building air quality and pandemic risk simulation

Published: 3 November 2021| Version 2 | DOI: 10.17632/cx3byrjx7b.2
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Description

The original paper contains a high-level explanation of the dataset characteristics, and potential use cases of the dataset. ArchABM can help to quantify the impact of some of these building- and company policy-related measures. Baseline experiment A baseline case with no measures and reduced ventilation is first studied. An schedule is set for each event type, along with their minimum and maximum duration, and the number of repetitions. The mask is not used anywhere. Meetings and the lunch activity are considered to be collective events. The places' capacity refers to the maximum number of people that can be present in that specified space. A low natural ventilation rate is established and there is no mechanical ventilation. Building-related experiments - Larger building: each room's area (and thus each room's volume) is increased by 20%. This measure needs to take into account the increase in costs, which would mean an increase of almost 20% in the final construction costs as well - Separate workspaces: the open office is divided into three identical offices, each one with 110 m2, 16 people (48/3), and a capacity of 20 (60/3). - Better natural ventilation: windows are opened everywhere except in restrooms for better outdoor air supply. Natural ventilation rate is increased up to 5. - Better mechanical ventilation: the flow rate of the AC system is incremented, assuming a 20% filter efficiency, a 10% of removal in ducts and no additional removal measures. Adding AC to the building would mean an increase of 14% in the building overall costs. Policy-related experiments - Shifts between workers: this would imply a reduction in the number of people present in each room. For this experiment, the population is reduced by 40%, resulting in 29 people in the open office, 4 in the IT Office, and 1 in each chief office, summing up to 36 people. This measure also entails a non-quantifiable cost to the company. - Limit duration of events: the duration of meetings is limited to a maximum of 30 minutes. The duration of coffee breaks would be limited to 5 minutes and lunch would be of 20 minutes. - Use of masks: in this case, the mask use is mandatory and the mask efficiency is set to 0.75 in the offices and meeting rooms, to 0.5 in the restrooms, to 0.3 for coffee breaks and leaving it at 0 for lunch breaks, representing the absence of masks while eating.

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Institutions

VICOMtech

Categories

Air Quality, Safety, Building, Agent-Based Modeling, Air Quality Modeling and Simulation, COVID-19

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